A Small Revolution in Germany

by Philip Hensher

  ‘Let’s just go for a walk,’ Ogden said, understanding that we were unexpectedly at a loss. The hotel, a glistening white 1960s construction, was on a sort of central artery of the city. We left and turned right. Huge stone buildings lined either side of the road, and a parade of shops, mostly of women’s fashion. They were beautiful and unconvincing, like museum displays of women’s clothes from a remote civilization in a state of perfect preservation. The colours were perhaps slightly strange. The cut was perfect in its own way, but inconceivable on a human being. Where the extravagant displays of shoes, gloves, hats and ballgowns in the pavement vitrines on the Kurfürstendamm had clearly been waiting only for the right rich woman to arrive and bring them to life, these creations had been made only for display. This was all the life they needed. They reminded me of the scenes in 1950s Hollywood movies where an ordinary girl is swept up by a millionaire and, in a showroom, seated on her own, learns that Paris couture can turn her into Audrey Hepburn, Doris Day, anybody. These clothes would never leave the window on anyone’s back. They bore no prices. They were meant only for the eyes of visitors even more naïve than we were. Opposite stood, in colossal self-assurance, the embassy of the Soviet Union.

  ‘That twenty-five Deutschmarks we changed,’ Ogden said. ‘We’re paying in Western money for the hotel, aren’t we?’

  ‘It’s the regulation,’ I said. ‘You have to change twenty-five Deutschmarks every day. So keep the receipt every time we do it. I guess it doesn’t much matter where you change it.’

  ‘Wait a second,’ Ogden said. ‘We’ve got to change twenty-five marks every day? Each? What are we going to spend it on? Is food expensive?’

  ‘You could buy a pair of shoes,’ I said. ‘Or anything. They’ve got pretty well whatever you want to buy. It’s good for books.’

  ‘Books in German,’ Ogden said. ‘That’s no good for me. Are you sure – twenty-five marks every single day?’

  I showed him the information in the guidebook. We were outside the Opera House, facing a large open square. Just there was a café with a terrace. We had fifty marks to spend today. We sat down. A shy-looking girl, toothy and pale, hovered at the door. In a moment a savagely hairy stout supervisor came out. He encouraged her to take menus to us. She might have been given a push, so jerky and unconfident was the movement in which she came over.

  ‘I don’t really want anything,’ Ogden said, having looked at the menu. ‘Why is she standing there? I might want to read the full thing.’

  ‘She’s doing what she was told,’ I said. The girl – we should say woman, I know – was frail and nervous, straight from school. Perhaps this was her first day in the job. She was standing by us, casting looks back at the hairy supervisor. A couple of tables away, two groomed, efficient civil-service types in suits and ties were paying her close, humorous attention. In her hand were a notepad and a small, neat pencil. She waited. She spoke no English, I could see.

  ‘I think I will have a Kaffee Komplett,’ I said in German to her. I had plucked the name more or less at random from the list of coffee options. She wrote down my order in full, slowly and neatly.

  ‘I don’t want anything,’ Ogden said. ‘I suppose I’d better start spending. What did you order?’

  I told him.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s some sort of coffee,’ I said. ‘I don’t know exactly. Look, it’s there. One mark forty-seven pfennigs.’

  ‘What did you order it for if you don’t know what it is? It might have hazelnut or brandy or anything in it. I’ll have the same. Mind you, I’m only having it because I need to change money. Twenty-five marks every day.’

  The waitress took our order. I watched her go with sympathy. I saw her life stretch before her. She had gone to an East German school for catering and tourism. She had studied hard and had got the top place in class. She had applied with diligence to the most prestigious of all East German cafés, the one by the opera house that every rich Western tourist stopped at. She was determined to make a success of this, and one day she would apply for official permission to open her own café in a suburb of Berlin. I saw her as a well-trained alternative to what Carole used to be. But was that how it worked? Or were all cafés and restaurants in the Democratic Republic supervised and controlled by a central authority? Could this girl do anything but rise up the ladder until she occupied the space taken by the furiously gesticulating man with the fat moustache standing in the open door, by the cupboards of forks and knives? I didn’t know. For a moment I thought of the question posed by an official Soviet visitor to the United Kingdom, much enjoyed by an academic economist I used to sit next to in hall: Please to tell me, who is the official in charge of the supply of cake to Central London? Who was that? And who was the official in charge of the supply of beer, of comfort, of a sense of security, a man to love? I felt I wanted to ask these questions in the Democratic Republic of Germany, where they would have a reassuring answer. Just now I did not have anyone to ask. The task was to investigate, not merely to be a tourist, snapping away at interesting monuments, museums, and the preserved or restored wonders of long-dead Prussian emperors.

  Ogden had opened the guidebook. He was reading drearily about the history of the square we were in. Books had been burnt in it. Two tables away, one of the business or civil-service types had got up, hardly saying goodbye to his colleague or friend, and hurried away. The other pressed his napkin to his mouth in a gesture of preparation and anticipation – cleaning himself, like a cat about to go out seducing. He looked in front of himself levelly for half a minute. I saw that the friend had left a ten Ostmark note in the saucer, not waiting for his change. The man got up, stretched his shoulders – had he been there a long time? He paid no attention to us. It was a surprise when he abruptly stopped by our table and sat down on the third chair. Ogden raised his eyes from his book; he stopped reading.

  ‘It is indeed something to think about when travelling in our country,’ the man said in English – his consonants were precise, his accent a little American. ‘The changing of money. This law! Our great government has determined it, the changing of twenty-five marks of hard currency every day. If your currency is hard currency, what is ours? Surely not soft. It seems harder than your currency. It never changes. It is exactly the same as the mark in your country. Or not in your country. Over there. This is the land of one to one. But what if it were not one to one? What if a gentleman were one day to approach you to suggest that he would be very happy to give you two marks in exchange for every one of yours? That would be very nice, would it not?’

  ‘It would also be illegal,’ I said. A thrill was running through me. We had not been two hours in the German Democratic Republic. We had already unearthed an enemy of the state. I felt that this was an interesting experience, an improvement on listening to Ogden reading out about the Nazis burning books.

  ‘Ah, legality,’ the man said. ‘Legal – illegal – legal – illegal. It is so pleasing, the way the state decides that one thing shall be illegal today, and a matter of being sent to prison, and tomorrow it shall change its mind, and the same thing is quite permitted. But again, I ask my question of you two intelligent gentlemen: you would be very happy, would you not, to be offered two of our marks for every one of yours?’

  ‘Happy up to a point,’ Ogden said. He folded his arms. He sat back in the chair. The man fell silent. I thought he had been stymied by Ogden striking a make-me-an-offer pose, a pose I hadn’t thought he had within him. But in fact he had seen what I had not, that the girl had emerged from the café door with our two coffees on a tray. He waited until she came. She set them down. She cast him a look. He remained seraphically calm, apparently unaware that she was there at all.

  ‘But I am not offering two of our marks for every one of yours,’ the man continued. ‘Today you will give your friend Mario one hundred Federal marks and he will give you four hundred of his East marks back. Y
ou are rich, gentlemen.’

  ‘Who’s Mario?’ I said.

  ‘That is I,’ the man said.

  ‘I don’t suppose you can give us a receipt,’ I said lightly. ‘I mean, it wouldn’t help us with our requirement to change twenty five marks a day.’

  ‘I am so sorry,’ Mario said. Could his name be Mario? He looked unremarkably German. ‘Unfortunately I have mislaid my book of receipts, even if I could lay my hands on a pen.’

  ‘Well, thank you, but—’ I began to say.

  Ogden interrupted me. ‘I don’t see why not,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you a hundred Western marks. Can you give me five hundred Ostmarks?’

  ‘That is too much,’ Mario said.

  ‘Five hundred,’ Ogden said.

  ‘Four hundred and fifty,’ Mario said.

  ‘Fine,’ Ogden said. He took out his wallet and, with complete openness, counted out ten ten-mark notes. In return, Mario, much more quickly, counted out forty-five notes from an envelope he produced from the breast pocket of his jacket. In a moment everything was swept away. Mario was rising to go. I had said nothing. The problems that would arise if I made a fuss here in public were insurmountable. I saw worse than embarrassment.

  ‘Where shall we go?’ Ogden said, as if nothing at all had taken place. ‘This is sort of the historic centre. I guess we could go and see some museums.’

  ‘There’s plenty to see,’ I said.

  ‘I’m just going to the loo,’ Ogden said, ‘and then we can go and see some of it.’

  Ogden got up and went inside. I called the shy waitress over.

  ‘To pay, please,’ I said. Then an inspiration struck me. ‘I don’t think people should use your café for black-market activities. Do you know what just happened?’

  ‘Please?’ she said, her forehead crinkling with the scriptless quality of my question. It occurred to me that she might not actually be very intelligent, her sweetness being enough even in the Democratic Republic for a frontline tourist job.

  ‘A stranger approached us and offered to change money illegally. At a black-market rate. I got the impression he was sitting here waiting for tourists to show up. Is he here regularly? I can describe him to you.’

  ‘I am quite new here,’ the girl said. ‘I don’t know the answer to your question. Please, write it down,’ the girl said, gesturing at the book on the table. It was the guidebook to the Democratic Republic, but it had a few blank pages at the end. I wrote a telegraphic version of what I had just said. ‘And your names, please.’ I wrote both our names. I felt that some kind of obligation had been fulfilled by her request, that nothing further would come of it. Some kind of obligation on my side, too. I had placed myself on the other side of the law, and of principles, to Ogden and his black-market Mario. I had done the right thing.

  ‘What was that all about?’ Ogden said, returning.

  ‘Just chewing the fat,’ I said. ‘Here’s the bill. You could leave three marks.’

  We checked into the hotel. We lay about for much of the afternoon reading our books. Towards evening, we found ourselves talking about James Frinton. It was not predictable that he would have left university and gone immediately into a job in the commercial mass media, writing reactionary comment for a million-selling right-wing newspaper. We remembered him from school; from those afternoons at Carole’s café, until she was closed down for tax avoidance; from sitting around at Joaquin, Euan and Kate’s place; from direct action. We had done a lot of shouting, of throwing things, of painting slogans on walls, of punching people who deserved to be punched. All that still went on, but those times were our most unified, our most directed, our most significant.

  I had never been caught by the police, but my criminal record should have been long and doleful. Ogden had actually been prosecuted. He had been discovered using old paint cans to try to dam the foul-smelling but shallow river that ran through the city centre. It was impossible for Ogden to run away from the police when they were standing with disbelief watching him, knee deep, midstream, kicking cans into place. It was on his fourth night constructing it that he’d been apprehended. The scale of the dam he seemed to be attempting drew the police’s curiosity. The question of why he had so many paint cans persuaded him to give a detailed answer of political conviction. That was when we were in the sixth form. Kate’s spare room was successfully cleared of the hundreds of paint cans she’d been complaining of. Ogden had his day in court, told twenty times to sit down and be quiet by the judge, was cheered from the gallery by fifteen Spartacists and their friends, had earned his spurs.

  But had Frinton been in the gallery? I wasn’t sure. There had been no criminal conviction to disclose when he applied for the Globe’s graduate programme. (Ogden’s MP, the famous Phil, had laughed about it at the interview. He had his own record of painting on walls, digging up cricket pitches, sending human shit in boxes to the South African High Commission.) Frinton had come along sometimes. He had been the girl in the pub fight who always offers to hold people’s coats. Perhaps only when the doors were closed and the company was known did he talk seriously, and with any appearance of commitment, about revolution and the future, and what action might be taken before socialism appeared on the Earth. I had heard him do so. Now I wondered.

  It had been a long time since I had seen him. It had been the day that he came to knock on my door to tell me about Tracy Cartwright. He had changed a lot – changed his clothes, mostly. He was wearing a tweed jacket and what D. H. Lawrence describes as ‘a little red rag of a tie’. His shoes were brown brogues, and polished. I had seen him about before, with his Trumper’s haircut close to the skull at back and sides, and floppy on top. He had turned himself into something different from the first day at university. It had not, it seemed to me, been a complete success. But had his appearance and behaviour towards us in the sixth form been a success? Ogden and I were talking in Berlin towards the end of an afternoon, in a hotel room whose warm, damp and disinfected atmosphere spoke of the night-time solitary sexual pleasures of Bulgarian delegates to conferences of unimpeachable ideological purity. We thought we had got Frinton quite wrong. We would not be so naïve now. We had thought he was on our side when he was standing there in order to examine us more closely.

  The true Frinton should have been apparent when we went to his place – the father’s rage-filled account books, the mother, the brother, the stench of the grandmother behind closed doors, the sense of mother-love reaching out beyond Eartha Kitt on the television to an object that had long gone somewhere else. The conviction that you could achieve anything, that bad luck and malice were keeping you in your place. Frinton wanted most of all to grow up into a man, I now believe, not to remain in the hell of boyhood. That was what was in the air at Frinton’s place. We hadn’t understood that, or that manhood, for Frinton, would always require the renunciation of principles.

  I had kept my principles. I had remained what I was, a boy. Our lives had not had enough experience to be other than awed and stunned by the superficial strangeness of the set-up. We all subscribed, too, to the belief that it was Frinton’s mother, in reality hard as nails and living within the successful coping mechanism of declared and performing depression, who would be the one to kill herself. I almost said ‘living happily’. But happiness was not the point.

  ‘I heard Frinton joined the Tory Party,’ Ogden said. ‘What is it with Oxford, what it does to you?’

  ‘Christ knows,’ I said. I had no idea.

  That evening, we decided to go to the bar we’d heard about, the one on the corner of Kollwitzplatz. Kollwitzplatz turned out to be a little distance north of the historic centre. The immaculate presentation of the historic, or idealistically future-looking façade, fell away quickly. We got on to the U-Bahn at Alexanderplatz, a statement of achievement and gleam. When we got out three stops along, the city had decayed into rotting tenements. The stone fronts were blackened and
decaying. The once grand front doors were dissolving and fraying at the bottom. Former palaces of bourgeois comfort sprouted trees from cracks in the wall thirty feet high, rotting and breaking apart, like stale old chocolate cake. We made our way past an ancient brewery, neighbourhood shops generically labelled Lebensmittel, cobbled streets where the nation’s only domestic cars sat parked, in the three colours that were all the nation needed. When we entered the dark brown space of the bar, lit with candles and half full of muttering people, we remembered where we had heard about it.

  We had hardly come in when a drinker stood up and greeted us. It was the Australian historian who had been waiting with us in the Reisebüro in West Berlin. It was an immense, a geological, stretch of time between then and now; no more than a day, but a colossal era. He asked us to come and sit down with him and his friend, who, he explained, was a bit of a dickhead. We agreed. It was a surprise to find out that the friend was a citizen of the German Democratic Republic, like our new friend a historian in a university. It surprised me that the Australian felt able to criticize individuals in this way without much lowering his voice.

  This bar was a bar that only had regulars – that was made up of regulars. The substance of their lives and habits, their rules and restrictions, their small desires and their short-term futures were present in the space like the wood of the stools and the smoke-darkened red paint on the ceiling. A lot of these people came here every day. There was a smell in Berlin in those days that you never smell any more, a smell of flesh long steeped in beer, and of what happens to clothes when they are deposited in an old-clothes shop. That smell: it appeared to me to be the smell of disappointment, and not just the result of particular molecules in combination. The centre and origin of that smell must have been in the bar at the corner of Kollwitzplatz – I never knew its name, or even if it ever had one. Nobody looked long at us, though they assessed us in their quiet way for what needed to be assessed. They knew what we were. They knew what each other was.